Scott Gregory's first book, Bandits in Print, makes the case that the material form of the traditional Chinese novel is fundamental to understanding its meaning and social significance. In this, it contributes to a growing body of scholarship that argues that Chinese literary history must include consideration of the physical format of the books through which—or as which—literature developed. Although the foundational modern studies of the traditional Chinese novel largely understood literary works as abstractable from their printed formats, more recent scholarship has insisted on the importance of aspects of the printed format of the traditional novel such as illustrations or commentary.Footnote ¹ By focusing on a single feature of printed novels, the first generation of print-aware studies traced developments over time that were overlooked by standard rubrics of literary studies more attuned to genre, theme, or literary techniques.

Both sorts of study left intact, however, the general sense that various editions are versions of a single work. When David Rolston identifies the commentary editions as a “re-creation, or even appropriation” of an original work, rather than its “supplement” (Traditional Chinese Fiction, 70), he attributes creative agency to commentators rather than authors. Since the modern study of the traditional Chinese novel developed with reference to the dominance of the novel genre in the modern West, the commentarial tradition was a crucial step toward understanding the development of longform Chinese fiction on its own terms. (And, as Gregory points out, much modern scholarship on Chinese narrative is indebted to traditional commentators).

If earlier work decentered the purported authors of fictional texts, Gregory decenters the commentator as well, to argue that, in part because it did not have a very strong “author function,” “the Ming novel was a highly flexible genre that could be reshaped endlessly in print by editor-publishers” (4). This idea that each edition requires a distinct interpretation (for whatever reason) marks a first step toward centering print; the idea is not far from previous studies of editions.

Gregory takes this idea further, however. The next step is the idea that the defining feature of the novel The Water Margin—that which distinguishes it from precursors or related stories—is “a general outline of plot” (5) characterized by a “quality of interwovenness” that resulted from “fragments of narrative [being] captured and woven together through print” (7). Gregory suggests that print—and not authorial or commentarial genius—was the medium that made possible interweaving at the length and to the degree of complexity of the novel. And, he argues, refigured as a product of print, “this quality of interwovenness was striking and novel to even the elite circles who read the earliest editions” (7).

Building on this idea that “interwovenness” in printed form was a luxury good in the middle of the sixteenth century, the final step entails rewriting the received history of vernacular fiction. Here, in what may seem a counterintuitive move for a study dedicated to the specificity of particular woodblock print editions, Gregory devises a method for studying a nonextant book: “reassembling its social, historical, and literary circumstances around its publication, including both literary and material factors, and through them, to decode the literary tastes that shaped them” (17).

Thus, although its title suggests that Gregory will be focusing on a single novel, The Water Margin, or Shuihu zhuan (first published in the sixteenth century), Bandits in Print actually argues that each edition of the book is best understood as a separate work with distinct intended audiences, interpretations, and social functions. Gregory uses reception theory (following Hans Robert Jauss) to argue that just as individual works form a “literary series” in which new works “solve formal and moral problems” of earlier ones, new editions of existing works do precisely the same thing (11). Gregory suggests that prioritizing the “edition” over the abstracted “work” allows him to “render moot” “the question of authorship,” and to “sidestep the question of the literary merit of vernacular fiction” (11). But Gregory is too modest. Prioritizing the edition over the abstract novel does more than that: it does in fact offer new perspectives on both the question of authorship and that of the literary merit of vernacular fiction.

The revisionist literary history proposed in Bandits in Print is structured around a fire that destroyed the Jiajing emperor's ancestral temple in 1541. In Chapter 1, Gregory argues that before that fire, the audience for The Water Margin was not the “urban nouveau riche” with whom the genre is usually associated, but rather “elite members of the official class” (19). He focuses on a nonextant edition of The Water Margin published by a hereditary military officer, Guo Xun, known as the Wuding edition. Gregory situates The Water Margin as part of a larger publishing project through which, he argues, Guo sought to craft an image of himself as a “Confucian-general” (Ru jiang) whose literary activities were a demonstration of his own personal virtue” (19). Gregory supplements Guo's life as sketched in official histories with analyses of his extant work, suggesting that he used private clan histories to “shore up his social reputation” (21); Tang literature to serve as “cultural capital,” (21); qu art-songs and rhyme books to prove himself “as not only a connoisseur but as active participant in literary production” (21–22), and to “advertise … his close relationship with the emperor” (33); and vernacular fiction to help him secure a promotion to duke by writing a fictionalized account of the founding of the Ming that gave outsized credit to his own ancestor (36–38). Thus, although this chapter is structured around a nonextant text, close readings of a large set of adjacent texts allow Gregory to tell a new story about the early days of printed vernacular fiction by grouping them by what was printed together rather than according to modern generic categories.

In Chapter 2, Gregory pieces together the “publishing space” (61) in which another nonextant early edition of The Water Margin circulated, one recorded as printed by the Ming Censorate Bureau (Ducha yuan). Gregory argues that whereas Guo Xun aimed to craft a persona through his publishing, the Censorate Bureau was primarily interested in publishing books that could function as gifts or objects of exchange (46–47). This distinction is not as absolute as it may first appear—despite a lack of decisive evidence, Gregory notes that there is considerable overlap between Guo's publishing projects and the Ming Censorate's, and that these editions may in fact be one and the same (35, 51). By comparing a list of Censorate publications with those of a Beijing-based commercial publisher, Jintai Wang Liang, Gregory makes the case that works of fiction and sanqu art song collections were relatively rare in mid-sixteenth century Beijing, and for that reason perhaps “most highly valued by this particular audience” (61). The absence of a commercial market for works of vernacular fiction thus prompts us to reconsider the story about the rise of the novel in China that has been told since at least the Qing dynasty—that it was driven by publishers marketing to a more popular, less distinguished readership. Instead, the novel may have been understood instead as a rare luxury object enjoyed only by a privileged few.

Through an instructive juxtaposition, Chapter 3 traces two disparate responses to, or developments of the novel in the wake of the 1541 fire. First, the example of Li Kaixian (1502–1568), an official who was dismissed from office in the fire's aftermath, is offered as a “model reader” in the elite milieu of the novel's early reception. Gregory shows how Li singled out the idea of literary craft as evidence that elite readers “saw The Water Margin not as ‘base’ or ‘crude’ in subject matter and language but as a novel literary innovation that took advantage of the medium of print” (66). Gregory also suggests that the elite of the mid-sixteenth century considered the medium of print crucial to their social life (68), as evinced by the fact that the once prominent official Li Kaixian gave voice to what Gregory calls a “literati revenge fantasy” (72) by transforming a sequence from the novel into a chuanqi play, Baojian ji (Record of the Precious Sword). Gregory's second example of post-1541 responses to the novel is Jianyang-based publisher Xiong Damu's Tang shu zhizhuan (Record of the Book of the Tang), wherein questions of historical accuracy replace earlier concerns with the art of literary composition (76). Xiong's version marks the beginning of the transformation of the novel's significance and reception away from its early elite readership and toward more widespread commercial production.

The final two chapters tread more familiar ground, dealing with well-known extant editions of the novel. Chapter 4 offers a new interpretation of the work of editor-commentators, proposing the concept of “paratextual character” to describe those figures, who “accompany the reader on the journey through the text” (81) without making a claim to authorship. This concept allows analyses of the familiar editions of The Water Margin to bypass questions of authenticity and attribution (especially pertinent in the case of the Li Zhuowu editions), and to focus instead on the rhetorical effect of the voice of each “paratextual character,” opening up new possibilities for interpretation. For example, Gregory highlights the ingenuity with which Yu Xiangdou—the most (in)famous of the Jianyang publishers, long associated with the gimmicky marketing of inferior, slapdash editions of novels—crafted his works. Yu created a consistent paratextual character as his persona, even though his process involved editing more than literary creation. This view of Yu is a welcome reminder that “‘commercial’ does not necessarily equate to cynical” (85). More generally, the notion of editor-commentator as a paratextual character allows Gregory to examine with nuance the ways that the creators of these early commentary editions harnessed the social energy of the late Ming (late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries) to become mediators of their culture (107), deftly balancing in their production processes the elements of the literary, the subversive, and the commercial that characterized Ming print culture.

Scholars have usually argued that Jin Shengtan (1610–1661) played a key role in raising the status of vernacular fiction by promoting the idea that it was equal in quality to the classics, and they have been intrigued by his extensive commentaries, which reveal a sustained “interest in the formal and structural elements of the novel” (111). In Chapter 5, Gregory shows first, that Jin drew on earlier editions more than he admitted, and second, that Jin ignored many obvious “structural” elements to focus instead on characters’ values and motives. If Chapter 4 proposed that what are usually dismissed as commercial or gimmicky editions actually feature creative and even literary elements, Chapter 5 shows that the idea that Jin Shengtan was an advocate for literary values above the subversive or commercial ones he associated with earlier commentary editions is unfounded: far from a purely literary project of formal analysis, Jin had complex motives of his own for publishing a new edition of The Water Margin.

Bandits in Print is clearly written and largely persuasive in its arguments—Gregory knows how to tell a good story, and, perhaps taking a cue from Ming editors, he even creates some suspense between chapters to keep us turning the pages. I would have liked to see more done with the lengthy—and very interesting—translated passages of text. As a methodological choice, the inclusion of such passages is crucial to integrating the focus on print with literary analysis, but closer readings of them would have enhanced the argument. Along the same lines, Gregory tends to focus on a single substantial example rather than a range or selection for the close analyses in later chapters. Yet since this is a book about how to read a long, interwoven work of fiction as a whole, more examples from more parts of the texts under study might have drawn out the range of associations with the commercial, the subversive, and the literary. Finally, given this book's focus on the primacy of the edition, I would have liked to see a more comprehensive assessment of recent work on editions, perhaps as an appendix, as well as more direct engagement with previous scholarship on editions. For example, Dai Bufan and Zheng Zhenduo's seminal work is mentioned, but not cited.

When scholars choose to focus on the medium of print as their object of study, the “contents” of the printed works they discuss tend to fade into the background. In studies of Ming–Qing literature, in-depth analysis of woodcut illustrations, multi-register page divisions, or publisher's notes can take the place of investigations of literary form, allegory, or representation. This study shows remarkable creativity in the way it develops a method for attending to both, and on the whole it succeeds. Reconstituting commentators as “paratextual characters,” for example, shows how the figures involved in a work's creation can be reconfigured by prioritizing print; and the willingness to delve into close analyses of genres usually far removed from the study of vernacular novels offers a welcome corrective to usual assessments that assume the genre was low-brow from the start.

Bandits in Print is remarkably innovative in its approach to reconstructing the early history of the vernacular novel by focusing on print culture, so it provides a model for how to adapt methodologies from book history to speak to literary history as well. Gregory's careful analysis of writing in multiple genres and the printed book in many forms offers a bold reassessment of the history of the vernacular novel that centers print without foregoing textual analysis.